What is HABIT?
HABIT is a collection of resources and training that supports Health Visitors, and their wider team, to have effective oral health conversations with parents of young children. We aim to enable parents to establish and implement key oral health habits in infancy; thereby improving children's oral health. Initially funded by the Medical Research Council, HABIT was co-designed with parents and Health Visitors across Bradford.
The intervention is underpinned by robust behaviour change theory (including systematic reviews, qualitative interviews, intervention mapping and community engagement).
We have shown that HABIT is acceptable to parents, feasible to be delivered by Health Visitors and leads to the adoption of key oral health habits by parents of infants.
So where does HABIT fit in?
When developing HABIT, we worked with Health Visiting teams to standardise a set protocol for its delivery, whilst retaining flexibility to adapt to individual parent needs. This means that HABIT can be used to support Health Visiting teams at any of their visits with families, include both universal visits, and those part of the MECSH (Maternal early Childhood Sustained Home Visiting) programme.